Movie notes: ‘Horsemen’ riding in after all

Dennis Quaid sees lots of dead people (murdered in imaginative and grisly ways) in ‘Horsemen,’ which opens Friday.

From the Things That Make You Go Aiiieeeee Dept…

The previews for the horror thriller “Horsemen,” starring Dennis Quaid, have been in theaters for at least a month. I know this because I saw one before “Slumdog Millionaire” last month; it was painfully loud and grotesque. The movie was scheduled to open March 6.

Then it wasn’t. Then it was again.

Turns out San Antonio is one of a few selected markets that’s getting a limited “test run” of “Horsemen” starting Friday, a rep for the studio, Lionsgate Pictures, said Wednesday via email. This must have come up quickly  it was not on the schedule for S.A. just a few days ago.

The film, which features Quaid as a burned-out detective trying to solve a horrific string of murders connected to the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, has had an inauspicious journey to the multiplex, which may explain the studio’s toe-in-the-water approach to distribution. The buzz hasn’t been good, with many online commentators dismissing it as a “Se7en” clone.

It also appears to have the dreaded “troubled project” label, mainly because, after being filmed more than two years ago, it underwent extensive reshoots in Chicago last April. The rehoots were so extensive, one character was taken out entirely. The scenes involving Neal McDonough as Police Chief Krupa were all reshot, but McDonough couldn’t make the reshoots (perhaps because he was working on “Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li,” which opened last week), so he was replaced by Chelcie Ross, most recently seen in the football flick “The Express.”

Then the movie turned up on the schedule without warning, with little publicity and no screenings in advance for critics. Not promising. Wonder how S.A. got so lucky…